In the summer of 2015, 24-year-old Carter Cruise summoned me to Los Angeles’s Line Hotel.

Sitting on an oval-shaped café couch, Carter was beaming. She had just won AVN’s Award for Best New Starlet and Best Actress — a feat accomplished only by Jenna Jameson — and she’d recently hired a publicist.

In the hip, gentrified Koreatown neighborhood, Cruise’s hoodie and dirty blonde hair contrasted with the straight bangs and acid-washed jeans of the girls around us — born-and-raised suburbanites who had sought refuge in L.A. Carter, too, was a migrant (in her case, from suburban North Carolina), but she had fled the South for sunny California to shoot porn, not to record acoustic ballads about cigarettes and coffee.

Carter, though, believed she fit in with the hotel hipsters. “I’m gonna slowly transition out of porn and become an EDM DJ,” she said between sips of late-night coffee, using the acronym for electronic dance music. “You should write about it!”

I wavered, telling her I had heard this tale before: Girls who were going to transition from porn star to stand-up comedian, YouTuber, and/or feminist blogger. Porn, they all claimed, was “a stepping stone to launching a brand.”

Within a few months, though, they were always back in front of their laptop’s webcam, masturbating for cash. Carter assured me she was different — after all, she had revived the coed look while filming porn in college before Duke porn star Belle Knox went viral. I told Carter she was wrong.

But this time I was wrong, because three years later, I’m standing in the foyer of Carter’s new home in southwest L.A., watching her prepare for her latest sold-out DJ tour — a first for the girl who starred in the porn series Teens Love Huge Cocks.

Wearing her hair in a bun, dressed in a rainbow shirt which reads KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD, Carter lugs in part of a huge delivery of water bottles. (Ravers need to keep hydrated.) “I nearly missed my delivery!” Carter says in a raspy voice reminiscent of Lindsay Lohan. As she picks up more bottles, her tucked-up hair reveals a “Call Me Daddy” tattoo on her neck. “It’s not an issue unless I’m in line at Starbucks, hungover, and a family sees it,” she says. “I get self-conscious. They must think, Who is this ratchet girl in front of us?” Then she giggles.

She laughs again as she recalls being on the road all year, DJing two to ten times a month. Whereas most porn stars attempting to go mainstream disavow their past, Carter has used hers to promote her gigs the way other porn stars use skin flicks to advertise their escort business. “I knew it was gonna be part of the spin,” Carter says. Although she declines to reveal how much she gets paid per show, she says it’s more than the $800 to $1,500 she makes for girl-on-girl porn shoots. This is because her bread and butter is DJing frat houses. Frat houses, she says, are the Venn diagram of porn and EDM. The boys equally love loud bass and bouncy boobs.

“I bring my boyfriend. We relive our college days,” Carter says. “I see a photo of him between two girls flashing their boobs and say, ‘So this is what you’re doing while I am DJing!’”

Most college dudes are polite, she says, even when inhibition levels are lowered after drinking copious amounts of beer from plastic cups. If one fraternity brother makes any sort of trouble, a fellow brother will typically have her back. Then there was the night Carter followed a group of them to an afterparty in a house unaffiliated with Greek life. One boy opened his bedroom door and yelled, “Slut! You’re a fucking slut!” then slammed it shut. Carter knocked. Locked. She grabbed a broom, walked outside, and smashed his porch lights. The frat boys watched in shock. “Don’t tell anyone,” Carter told them.

“Nah, we won’t,” one replied.

“Greek life gets a bad rap, just like porn,” Carter says. “But there are a lot of good people in it as well.”

Carter sees intersections between porn and many parts of life. When I ask about her childhood, she recalls spending her days hiding in Barnes & Noble’s sex section, flipping through books about the Kama Sutra.

“I was very sexual even as a child, very attuned with fantasies… I always had fantasies of BDSM, very young, early on,” Carter says. “I’ve been sexually inclined as long as I can remember — I knew it was something I shouldn’t feel. So I kept it a secret.

“I have this theory: Because human sexuality is so repressed, a lot of our first sexual experiences [stem from activities] we are ashamed of — we masturbate, we experiment with a friend, we have a teacher fetish. Taboo things are fetishized because we are taught to fetishize shame. If you are with someone and you see someone else you want to have sex with, it’s taboo. You repress this till you cheat. [Stepsister porn] is not about incest. It’s that it’s taboo, wrong, and dirty. That we should feel ashamed turns us on.”

Carter’s parents were middle-of-the-road. Dad worked in finance while Mom taught school, but many locals preached conservative values. “There’s regular racism, sexism, and homophobia [in North Carolina],” Carter says. Her childhood sex obsession, she believes, was connected to her surroundings. North Carolina was an insular world of shopping malls and social traditionalism, but Carter believed she was bigger than her bubble, destined to accomplish something bolder.

Frat houses are the Venn diagram of porn and EDM. The boys equally love loud bass and bouncy boobs.

Her parents sent her to theater classes, and she acted in community musicals. But just as she secretly fantasized alone in her bed at night, Carter dreamed of something beyond performing in local Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.

“Take me to L.A.,” she recalls saying to her parents one day. “I am going to be a child star.”

“Sit down,” her dad told her.

Craving thrills and prone to mood swings, Carter says she concluded that local theater was about as good as she could do in her town. She started telling herself that if she really wanted to head to Hollywood, no one could stop her, not even her dad.

Finances, though, proved to be an obstacle. After graduating from high school, she didn’t have the money to chance a move out west. So she took out loans and enrolled in East Carolina University in 2009, determined to study theater.

During her freshman year, Carter decided to join a sorority. She wanted to make friends, but she also discovered that the idea of sorority initiation rituals triggered those childhood BDSM fantasies.

“I was into the whole idea of hazing,” Carter says. “It’s extreme, it’s pushing your limits, it’s proving you should be a part of something. From all the BDSM stuff I’ve [thought about], I am someone who loves extremes, pushing myself. I picked my sorority because I [heard] they had hazing.”

At her entry ritual, though, her sisters declined to haze her. “What?” Carter responded. “I am ready to be hazed.”

Joining the sorority, she became a regular on the Greek life circuit. If you went to frat parties in North Carolina during the second Obama administration, Carter says you probably knew her name.

But by junior year, she was bored with sorority life and began reading about sexuality on Tumblr. “I felt trapped,” she says, alluding again to the traditionalism around her.

Then one day, Carter watched an online porn movie starring Jessie Andrews, and was capitivated by its lush colors. This is so beautiful, she thought. I could do that. Between the artistic porn and feminist sex Tumblrs, Carter believed she was witnessing the start of the second sexual revolution.

“I wanted to be on the front of that wave,” she says. She decided that if a young woman like her — a college girl raised in the suburbs — shot porn and was open about the experience, maybe it wouldn’t seem as taboo to people.

Sitting in her sorority house, Carter drafted a ten-year plan: She would make porn movies, write about her adult career on a sex-positive Tumblr, transition into electronic dance music, and then move into mainstream acting.

When she called her parents to tell them her plan and explain why she was starting with porn, her father listened patiently, seeming to view his daughter’s decision as another example of her need for excitement, for pushing her own boundaries — and those of others.

And so, Carter Cruise (a stage name) shot her first film. The distributor released it her senior year, and she became the hot topic in North Carolina Greek life. As she sauntered through frat parties, boys hit on her. She was the only porn star they knew, and she seemed dateable.

But not all the attention was positive. One Christmas Eve, Carter says a former sorority girl messaged her, “I hope your dad is [so] ashamed of what you do that he kills himself.” Carter found the girl’s in-laws on Facebook and sent them screenshots of the girl’s messages. “You might not agree with my life choices, but the message she is sending is very negative,” Carter remembers writing.

Experiences like this made Carter realize that porn — the foundation of her ten-year plan — could destabilize her future goals. She decided she wouldn’t mention porn on her social media accounts, and it’s still her online approach today. Look at her Instagram and you’ll find Carter in millennial pink hats, Carter in black boots at Coachella, and Carter eating pizza. She could be any Instagram celebrity.

One day Carter watched an online porn movie starring Jessie Andrews, and was captivated by its lush colors. This is so beautiful, she thought. I could do that.

“Myself on my social media is different from my porn-star persona,” she says. “I don’t cam. I don’t sext. I want people to understand when I go do porn, I am playing a character, like ‘crazed slut who can’t wait to suck cock today.’ I don’t want people to think they can treat me a certain way. I don’t post sexual things. People aren’t following me for free porn. I had the end goal in the beginning.”

When Carter moved to Los Angeles in 2015, her plan went off-course. A porn production company refused to pay her, and she struggled to meet her $2,500 monthly rent. So she moved to a cheaper one-bedroom, a cute but “old and dusty” apartment on Sunset and Western in Hollywood. Carter fucked the same actors over and over again, and got bored. She decided to stop shooting boy/girl porn and move toward another phase of her plan: DJing. At first, she could only book one or two low-paying gigs a month. For a yearlong stretch, Carter says she only made around $25,000 and was forced to liquidate her porn-boosted savings.

Desperate for cash, she found herself crying on her apartment floor. What have I done? she thought. I used to make more money. She contemplated returning to boy/girl porn, or maybe taking up camming. Then she told herself, No, I want this. I just have to keep DJing. She hustled on.

Two years ago, the tide turned. Squads of young fraternity brothers googling “porn star” and “frat” stumbled on Carter’s 2014 interview with TotalFratMove.com (Gawker for Greek life devotees). The interview got widely circulated, creating a wave of new collegiate fans. More and more frat boys started emailing Carter, and she realized there was a lucrative DJ opportunity before her: frat parties.

“People like that I’m a regular chick,” Carter says of her appeal. “That’s why they liked me in the porn industry. You can meet me at a bar.” She ruffles her shirt. “I don’t have big tits. I come early to frats and stay late.”

The frat parties bring in good money, too. Carter and her boyfriend now rent an expensive new house, sharing it with three fun-loving housemates. When I walk in, a few skull statues sit on an otherwise empty marble counter in the kitchen.

To support her lifestyle, she continues to shoot girl/girl scenes. Because just as porn can promote a performer’s escort business, the work attracts young men to Carter’s DJing. “Porn is a way to make fans,” she says matter-of-factly. She knows some of the frat-party gigging could go away if her porn name vanished.

“Some girls try to deny they’ve ever done porn [when they seek mainstream work],” Carter continues. “I don’t want to name names, but they lose fans. I want to respect the adult industry. That’s why I always speak up for sex-worker rights. I built a fan base that wanted these things.” Thanks to the frat-party success, she now scores additional DJ gigs at clubs and raves.

But porn is still porn, reputation-wise. Recently, a promoter canceled a gig after he learned of Carter’s porn background. Then there are those who label her as nothing more than another “model DJ” — a pretty girl who presses “play” on a laptop and pantomimes DJing, her name adding value to the event flyer. But given her first career choice, she’s used to criticism, and shrugs it off. “After you shoot porn, you think, Fuck it.”

Still, the stigma attached to porn rubs Carter the wrong way, because so many girls are flashing their tits and asses on Instagram, proudly declaring themselves “thots” — that ho over there — while critiquing porn stars.

“People like that I’m a regular chick. That’s why they liked me in the porn industry. You can meet me at a bar.”

“People reclaim ‘thot’ and ‘slut,’ but not ‘porn star,’” she says. “I have friends who say they would never do porn, but they have private Snapchats where they post porn. I just saw a female DJ on social media talk about how she used to strip, but then she said, ‘I would never do porn!’”

Hoping for a shift toward a new sexual revolution, Carter has instead watched porn get caught up in a new kind of culture war. She points to politicians who want to force porn stars to wear condoms, but then refuse to meet with sex workers.

“We need [their help],” she says. “People who are behind [these laws] are antiporn, antisex, people like Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris, who support FOSTA [Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act]. The people behind that legislation are not behind sex workers at all. [Democratic senators] didn’t talk to us. They think they are doing something good for people, but they don’t know because they don’t talk to people [in the industry]. How can you help someone if you haven’t asked what they need?”

Believing this new, rising platform outside of porn work — her DJ touring — might chip away at the antiporn bias a bit, Carter has also started producing music while continuing to embrace her porn-star role. She’s released remixes and some of her own songs, and spent the past year and a half writing and recording an EP called Sin Music.

“I’m not trying to be a singer,” she says. “I just want a personal project. It wasn’t about having a banger to play at shows. It was a passion project. I wanted to show I wasn’t just a model DJ to put on a flyer. I spend so much time working on my sets, working to make each unique and special. Also, there’s nothing wrong with model DJs. I have friends who are more model/Instagram types who play Sephora openings. That’s dope! But that’s not what I wanted to be. I want to have my own show. I want to have dancers. I want to have a whole visual thing. Model DJs don’t get that.”

Seated in her fine new home, plunging a spoon into a protein shake, Carter admits the ten-year plan she dreamed up in college hit a few bumps along the way. But she also knows she’s beaten the porn odds.

“I could have a more comfortable life with a regular job, but this is the life I wanted,” she says. “I didn’t do porn, or start DJing, for money. I wanted to have a cool life with experiences. It’s not the happy life you always see on social media. It’s a struggle. They don’t see me crying on the bathroom floor.” Again, she laughs. Then she adds, “I’ll take the lowest lows for the highest highs. That’s just the part of the process.”